Performing the initial triage

Before we go over some common issues and their solutions, there are some important, catch-all steps that can be performed in the face of a problem. You never know, one of these steps might just work.

For starters, if you run into a software-related issue on your Linux Mint computer, there's always a chance that the issue you're experiencing may not have anything to do with your computer or your installation at all; you may be experiencing a software bug. For this reason, you'd be surprised at how updating all of your packages often may solve issues. The reason is that perhaps the developers of the application you're having trouble with noticed the issue already and submitted a fix for it. If you use a newer version of the package, it may include a patch that fixes the problem you're having. Even if your graphical environment fails to load, you can still update your system using the shell with the following command:

sudo apt-get update...